A commonly accepted (and not entirely inaccurate) image of the kind of person who contributes to Wikipedia was established very early on, and it is true to this day. They are largely male, concentrated in North America and Europe. An internal assessment once concluded that one of the biggest risk factors Wikipedia’s faced in holding onto its most prolific contributors was that they might get a girlfriend.
But as journalist Richard Cooke writes in The Last Best Place on the Internet — his crowded, fizzing history of the free online encyclopaedia — Wikipedia at its best draws “from the full expanse of human experience in time and space”.
The product of a quarter of a century of work undertaken by tens of millions of people, comprising 68 million articles across more than 300 languages, Wikipedia is the largest collection of information ever created. It has been edited from the Antarctic, “in the forests of Togo and in the wilds of Alaska”, and even from space. What unites all of the work that goes into creating Wikipedia is that it is “unpaid and self-initiated, without formal direction from any authority”.
As such, for good and for ill, it is a supremely human achievement. In 2019, when astronaut Christina Koch updated the article about spacewalks to include the one she had just taken herself, it sparked a debate among Wikipedians as to whether this represented a conflict of interest. Meanwhile, Cooke writes, “in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, an editor held the papers of Mary Somerville, the first person ever to be called a scientist, and wondered if he was breaching the policy on ‘no original research’.”
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The Last Best Place on the Internet flies through Wikipedia’s history — from its foundations and early exponential growth, its controversies and scandals as it became culturally entrenched, through to its current, uneasy reputation as “the last bastion of shared reality“.
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Cooke’s prose mimics and revels in Wikipedia’s “cabinet-of-curiosities capaciousness”, its fulfilment of Vannevar Bush’s July 1945 prediction that technological advances could bring about “new forms of encyclopaedias … ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them”.
This structure recreates the pleasures of dropping into Wikipedia’s warren of ideas and history, getting lost among its burrows, and finding what one interview subject describes as the “abandoned cathedrals” of its most obscure and eccentric entries.
“The book was originally structured like a Wikipedia entry — it had an overview section and a history and a controversy and a personal life, and I was lucky enough to have a brilliant editor who just thought that that was making it a bit too rigid, and came up with this idea of jettisoning chapters altogether,” Cooke tells Crikey. “I trust him a lot, but when he proposed that, I said, ‘Look, the only thing this length I know of that is structured like that is the Unabomber’s manifesto’.”
Eventually, though, Cooke found this approach “was a very liberating way to do it” and helped create a “wiki rabbit hole that follows these pathways of interest”.
The book delves into the philosophy that animates this monument to information, the competing ideas about the nature of knowledge, truth and neutrality, and what qualifies for inclusion in an encyclopaedia in the first place — even one as sprawling as Wikipedia. These arguments can be broadly collected under the headings of the “inclusionists” versus the “deletionists”.
Further, it explores the philosophies of the people who founded the platform. It may surprise a contemporary reader to hear that Wikipedia — freely available, the product of huge unpaid communal efforts — was produced by adherents to Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand’s objectivism.
“Some people have jokingly called Wikipedia the only good thing libertarians have ever made,” Cooke says. “I’m not sure if that’s fair, but [Wikipedia is informed by] as much a cultural libertarianism as a political one.”
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Co-founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger have split into very different directions in the years since. Wales’ persona is that of an optimistic, consensus-driven, Davos-attending insider. Larry Sanger, who departed Wikipedia in 2002 and has since been an outspoken critic of the platform, has become a highly conservative Christian. He joined, as it happens, the vanishingly small Anglican Church in the United States, which Cooke calls “a bit of a signature move for him, to be on the out of the out”. Sanger’s solitary posture presented Cooke with a challenge.
“Sanger was very reluctant to talk with me at first; he really refused pretty solidly for two years,” Cooke says. The usual journalistic argument, that the book would represent an incomplete account without his input, didn’t cut it.
“So it became about accepting his worldview, which has this very heavy emphasis on fact, and saying, ‘well, I’ve tried to meet your worldview halfway, but I can’t decide on your facts for you. I can’t just guess at them. It needs your involvement to have them in there.’”
The subjects of the book, says Cooke, haven’t read it yet.
“I’m very interested to know how they will respond. Jimmy Wales in particular, I think it’s a complementary picture of him for the most part,” Cooke says. “But I also know there are aspects of the book that he won’t like, so I’ve tried to not just make it fanboy service for Wikipedia. I’ve tried to make it a detailed picture, but there will be a couple of sore points there.”
The book ends with Wikipedia finally being drawn into the culture wars it had for so long avoided. Elon Musk dubbed it “Wokepedia” and attempted to usurp it with his own version, Grokopedia. But so far, it’s endured relatively unscathed — as Cooke points out, “even Elon Musk fanboys aren’t making Grokopedia part of their everyday life in the way that Wikipedia is”.
Then there is the threat posed by artificial intelligence, a threat magnified by Wikipedia’s success in collating and making available so much of “the sum of all knowledge”.
“There is a possibility that Wikipedia has kind of sowed the seeds of its own destruction by being such an important part of the AI revolution, this huge training corpus that was responsible, or part responsible, for AI coming along when it did.”
Wikipedia’s impact is undeniable, but its true legacy is less clear-cut.
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“A through line in the book is this historical concept of a universal encyclopaedia,” Cooke says.
“There are all sorts of strains in Enlightenment thinking that if you can just get everybody on the same page in quite a literal sense, if you can just build this set of facts that everybody can agree on, that will produce consensus all by itself”.
As such, Cooke says, the platform’s reputation as the “last bastion of shared reality” may be misplaced. “Wikipedia is the closest thing that’s ever existed to that universal encyclopaedia, and its effect on making things like public discourse more reasonable or more reason-driven is undetectable,” he says.
“Its achievement is that it has given people access to this information, but that doesn’t mean that it has ushered in an age of reason along with that.”